As late comers slowly streamed into the cozy club room, the assembled members continued to mingle and digest the magnitude of the task which they had accepted.
What kind of oath have I sworn? It may not be perhaps the most apt comparison, but I never thought I would live my own Peach Garden Oath moment. Thought Liu Zhen, eyeing his future companions in arms.
In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the most legendary Chinese literary works, three heroes took an oath of brotherhood to live and die on the same day to fulfill the dream of restoring the Han Dynasty to its former glory, and rid the land of the evil which beset it. Would he find his comrades among this eccentric bunch? Admittedly, Liu Zhen was cautious. He was hardly a conservative, but at the end of the day, he was a product of his times, and such a man was deeply suspicious about the intentions of foreigners. He was not a shy man by any standard, but he was hardly ready to casually mingle.
It wasn't that he held any particular reason to be prejudiced, after all he had lived in Shanghai, a very international city, and his teachers growing up were English, Dutch, German, and just about every other nationality you could find in Europe. Yet the weight of the past century's history was still all too real in his psyche, as was the treatment he had received from his British overseers during the war. Most others in the Chinese Labour Corps were illiterate peasants, and were willing to put up with the condescension of their European taskmasters for the paycheck that they received, but needless to say, the experience could've been better. Of course, I should be happy we didn't have to fight on the front lines like the sorry men who we had the 'honor' of burying.
Scanning the room for someone to find someone to chat with, and found himself looking at a finely dressed young woman with an Asian face, who was quietly writing in her notebook. She looked like she clearly had no patience for the loutish arguing that was happening, but Liu Zhen was intrigued enough to want to walk over and start a conversation.
Upon taking several steps nearer, Liu Zhen noticed that she was probably a little older than he had initially guessed, though perhaps not by much. Judging from the fine embroidery of her dress, not to mention the gold jewelry, this was a well to do woman. This piqued his curiosity, for there were few Asians in Europe, let alone wealthy ones. His first intuition was that this woman was probably Japanese, but then again he couldn't really be sure just judging from the face alone.
Liu Zhen did not grow up as a poor boy, but even now he felt somewhat self conscious, and subconsciously smoothed out some of the worn threads on his suit. It was used brown tweed suit that he had bought shortly after arriving in London, and while he had saved away somewhat more money than the other peasants in the Labor Corps, Liu Zhen tried to avoid burning through too much of his funds. After all, he had no idea how long it would be before he would finally go home in the midst of the pandemic.
He coughed quietly to clear his throat and tried to catch her attention as he walked up to her chair. He decided upon a simple greeting in English before switching to a heavily Suzhou accented greeting in Guanhua* (Late Qing/Early Republic of China terminology for Mandarin). "Excuse me madam, my name is Eric Liu, may I ask for your name? It is a pleasure to meet you, may I ask what country you are from? Ni shi Zhongguo ren ma? (Are you Chinese?)"
It was a rather awkward introduction, and he suspected that even if she was another Chinese woman, she might not immediately understand him if she was not from the Jiangsu area. As he spoke the words however, his eyes naturally went to look at what she was writing in her notebook.
He did not know how to read the text, but growing up in Suzhou, he had seen it written rarely on government buildings alongside Chinese. Yet recognition did not immediately hit him, because it also seemed to resemble Mongolian script, which he had once seen from some travelers hailing from Inner Mongolia. As he awaited the woman's response, the cogs slowly turned in his head as he tried to remember what the significance of the text was.
